Hadley Park’s Name Is Already Subversive

Local activist Joshua Lipscomb is petitioning to change the name of Hadley Park to Malcolm X Park. According to his petition, this is the reason he wants to do it:

Hadley park was formerly a slave plantation owned by a white slave-owner named John L. Hadley & his family which had lived on the site. Once the plantation was made into a park after centuries of slavery, the city named it after Hadley to honor him. THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!

So today in 2018, at the heart of a very culturally enriched predominately Black part of Nashville, lies a park whose name promotes & honors slavery, the evils of white supremacy, & racism. The main occupants of this park are predominantly Black & It's beyond embarrassing & degrading for Black people to have to socialize in a park in their neighborhood that is named after a man that owned and abused their ancestors.

This is a common enough belief. Dr. Bobby Lovett, in his book

, writes:

The city held the opening ceremonies on the sunny afternoon of July 4, 1912, when notable Negro leaders, the mayor, and some members of the city park commission addressed the crowd from the porch of the Hadley Plantation house. When John L. Hadley’s farm was surveyed in 1908 to determine the exact acreage, Mary E. Hadley was still living in the house, two miles from the river. However, whereas the last direct descendant passed away shortly before the ceremony, Alexander Pope, one of the former slaves, spoke to the crowd about his life on the plantation.

This doesn’t seem to be true, though. The Nashville Globe reported that the weather was terrible. The ceremony was delayed due to rain, and showers fell on and off all afternoon. The only reference I could find to the land being Hadley land before the park was dedicated was in an advertisement in the April 23, 1871, Republican Banner, which reads: “Good pasturage, for horses and cattle, at the Hadley farm, on Jefferson Street extended, or Bosley Pike, two miles from the city.”

But the white Hadleys lived in Hadley’s Bend, up where Old Hickory is now. Mary Hadley is in the 1910 census up on Hadley’s Bend Road in Civil District 4. In 1900, the census takers don’t list a road, but she and John L. and their kids are still in Civil District 4.

Plus, Mary and John had kids, and those kids were alive (and legal children) when the park was dedicated. So there were direct descendants. There were white Hadleys to invite to the park dedication if, indeed, the Hadleys were tied to the land.

But as far as I can tell, no white Hadleys lived there. I can tell you who did live in that part of town, though. A ton of black Hadleys. In the 1907 city directory, there are almost 40 Hadley households in Nashville, and all but three of them are black. And most of them live in North Nashville.

My guess, if I had to make one, is that the black Hadleys came into town during the Civil War, and some of them ended up sharecropping on that Harding property, thus making it locally known as the Hadley farm. I can’t find any evidence that white Hadleys lived there, but there's a ton of evidence of black Hadleys nearby.

Here’s another interesting and curious thing. The Globe, the black paper in town at the time, didn’t specify which Mr. Hadley the park was named after. They write “Mr. Hadley” repeatedly, but never give him a first name. The Globe does, however, give us a long paragraph about how awesome all the black Hadleys are and what a big deal Dr. C.H. Hadley, who had a beautiful house nearby, is, since he was the principal of a school and Supreme Grand Master of the Independent order of Immaculates. That was on July 7. On July 12, The Globe yet again leaves this white Hadley unnamed. “It was customary in pre-freedom times for slaves to have the Christian name of their owner. Hence, a number of Nashville’s best colored families have their names derived in this manner, from this man Hadley. Among them was one Dr. W.A. Hadley, deceased 1901, one of Nashville’s pioneer physicians and school teachers, in whose memory the Hadley School received its name.”

This article does give us a hint as to the identity of this supposed Hadley. It says his daughter was “Mrs. Mary Hadley Clair.” This is certainly Mary Hadley Clare. Mary Hadley Clare’s father was William Hadley, who practiced law in Sumner County and was one of the first mayors of Gallatin. Well, you can’t be mayor of Gallatin and live west of Nashville. That’s just physics.

So, what’s going on here?

I think — and let me be clear, this is just my opinion — that the answer lies with Ben Carr, a local activist (perhaps a forerunner of Joshua Lipscomb), who pretty much single-handedly made the park happen. He agitated the mayor, Hilary Howse, until Howse fulfilled his campaign promise of a city park for black people. Carr organized the celebration when the park opened and had enough pull to move the ceremony to see if the rain would clear. He then ran the park for a number of years.

I think Carr wanted to name the park for a prominent North Nashville family, but felt that the chances of Nashville letting him name the park for black people were slim and none. So, he, with the help of The Globe, made up some bullshit about naming the park for some white Hadley. Which white Hadley? Well, clearly they hadn’t decided on one.

Meanwhile The Globe had quite a few awesome black Hadleys they could tell you about.

Maybe the Hadley name is too tainted by its ugly connotations, and Malcolm X is a fine name for a park. But if we have to change it, I want to put my vote in for Benjamin Carr Park, because that park wouldn’t have happened without him.